


Girl from Nowhere

by Callmesalticidae, shadow_wasserson



Series: The Gods Have Horns [9]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, First Meetings, Functional Alcoholism, Gen, Godstuck, Job offers, Orphanage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 03:02:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3961975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callmesalticidae/pseuds/Callmesalticidae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadow_wasserson/pseuds/shadow_wasserson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are Roxy Lalonde: orphan, coding master, and underage drunkard. It's a wonder the academy's superintendent hasn't thrown you out yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Girl from Nowhere

Your name is Roxy Lalonde, and you are simply the best there is. No need to specify at what. You are the best at all of the things. All of them.

But if you  _did_  have to specify, you suppose that you would say you are the ultimate best at computers. In fact, you are the drunken master of computers. Nobody can hope to beat you when you’ve got a wine bottle in one hand and a keyboard under the other. Nobody. Not even you when you’re sober, actually.

  
_That_  unfortunate fact has forced you to scrap your computer wholesale and just buy a new one on many an occasion, on account of not being able to figure out how to get past the new security system that you designed on it while you were drunk, or the password that you set at the same time. You keep telling yourself that you need to write these things down but you never remember. You have absolutely no idea why that is.

But what can you do? Programming is in your blood; when you are cut, ones and zeroes spill out of your arm. Your fingers fly not like it’s your nature, but like they’re responding to the thrum of destiny. It was fate, it had to have been, that when some rich dude bequeathed half his library to the orphanage one Christmas when you were still a tyke, that you were the one who got the programming books with all those pictures of cats on the cover. You learned to  _read_  out of those books, for crying out loud. You were made for this. It’s your telos.

But you are not just the drunken master of all coding. You are also one of the many students to have blessed— or blighted— the halls of Our Lady Who Is Without Mother Or Father Academy for Girls. You are undoubtedly the best and most favorite of the superintendent’s, but she doesn’t like to let on that she plays favorites so she’s always yelling about how she’s one more misstep away from throwing your ass out on the curb. That never happens, though, no matter how many times you hack into her computer system, so you’re pretty sure that it’s all just talk and smokescreens.

After all, if she didn’t want those letters to be spread around then she wouldn’t have put them there after you’d already hacked her three times before, right? Nah, you’re totally on the best of terms. The fake mad face is just a part of the charm.

Still, she does have to keep up a front if she’s going to keep the rest of the school fooled about how much she actually doesn’t hate your guts, so she has to make a profanity-filled house call every now and then. Seeing as you’re Little Orphan Annie that means she doesn’t have to walk very far, just down the block, so these visits happen quite a bit.

Most people avoid coming in your room. You did have a couple of roommates but you kept hacking the records or breaking into the records office and changing your file, and eventually the matrons just plain gave up and let you have it your way. And if they want to talk with you, well, they knock, or they just scream at you through the door. Which is what just about anybody does but the superintendent, actually, since you have been known to come at people with broken bottles when they make too much noise or touch your hardware.

So when you hear somebody enter your room one morning, you don’t bother asking who it is. You just keep at it, smacking keys and drowning your hangover behind a wall of monitors, towers, and books.

But it isn’t the super, it’s some jackass with a lisp. When you find that out you’re about to curse him out but, on a whim, you poke your head over the Great Wall of China and— hot damn, and thank your lucky stars you didn’t say anything, because this isn’t a jackass, it’s  _the_  jackass, Sollux Captor, the Mage of Doom, wearing some ratty moth-eaten coat over his godhood.

“Nice coat,” you tell him.

He shrugs. “They tell me I have to look decent for the public. ‘Like  _people_ ,’ is how Kanaya put it. She says it looks like pajamas.”

“Sorta does,” you admit.

“Fuck her. You’re lucky I’m wearing anything.”

Yeah, this is totally his protest costume.

But what is he doing here? You don’t know, so you ask him. And then you offer him breakfast, just to be a good host.

“What is that shit?”

“Pickled prunes, tripe, cinnamon, eggs, and rum. Hangover cure.”

“You put rum in your hangover cure?” Sollux obviously doesn’t know what to make of you— best person ever, or supreme best ever? You don’t know the answer yourself, so you can’t really help him.

“How else am I supposed to get a good start on my drinking?” Okay, you’ve nailed it. You are the best of friends or something now probably. Especially since he took a spoon from out of nowhere and is sharing your awesome hangover cure soup with you.

You eat in silence, or at least as much as you can get amid the clicker-clakker of the keys. Meanwhile Sollux is taking a look around your room, frowning, smiling, shaking his head, doing some more smiling.

“I want to offer you a job,” he says, and you want to do a spit take but the soup’s all gone and you’re just now noticing that he snatched your wine from out of your reach.

“Uh say who what now?”

“Let’s just say that we’re very interested in what you can do. So I’m offering you a job at SkaiaNet,” he says. “And you will be given a place to study at the Canon Order of She Who Measures when you graduate from here.”

You squint at him. “But I do computers.”

“I want a lawyer.”

“Do I have to read ya your Miranda Rights?”

Sollux blinks. It evidently takes him a moment to figure out what you’re going on about. “I don’t need another programmer that I could outperform on my worst day. I need somebody with half of Terezi’s legal sense and a tenth of my coding. A lawyer with your special talents would have many uses.”

You never realized that the gods played so dirty. This is going to be fu—

“But there is a catch,” he continues, and you groan inside. “You’re a good student, but you’re still a menace and a delinquent. That kind of shit isn’t supposed to happen, by the way. With your behavior you should be flunking or something.”

You lean back in your swank rolly-chair. “Maybe I fixed my grades.”

“You didn’t. I would know.”

Aw.

“So you have to keep off the booze.” Wait,  _what_? “You are, I have been assured, a functioning alcoholic. Nevertheless, you are also unpredictable when you are drunk, and I do not want to lose my investment at the age of thirty for the sake of an exploded liver.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re very good at what you do.”

You give him an appraising look. "But it’s  _me_ , isn’t it? I'm some kinda chosen one or something. Next thing you'll say you got me into this in the first place, that you gave me those coding books for Christmas when I was three- oh fuck you did, didn't you?" You don’t know whether to scream or laugh or try to both at once. The superintendent doesn’t actually like you that much, does she? But she answers to a higher power that doesn’t care about that... “You’ve been watching me this whole time. You got me into this stuff to begin with! And you just want to play it all cool like it’s nobody’s thing or whatever I just happened to be the best there is— which I am, don’t get me wrong.”

“Why would I select you out of all of the orphans in the world?”

“Because I was… different?”

Sollux snorts. “You were a baby. What’s different about you?”

You take a moment to think about it. “You knew my parents. They were something special.”

He smiles. “Smart kid. But you’re wrong. You don’t have any parents.  _That’s_ why you’re special.”

You just about leap out of your chair. “What do you mean? Was I some sort of… cloning experiment or something?”

The Mage of Doom slips a card into your hand. “Study hard. Stay in school and out of trouble. Then maybe you’ll find out. And whatever you do, don’t pray.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

The coat falls down around him, his wings unfurl, and— Sollux is gone and the room is empty, save for you.

You don’t talk with another one of the gods for six more years. You manage to stay out of the bottle for nine.


End file.
